Add billions of mobile phones to the world’s e-waste problem

Global e-waste is growing by 40 million tons a year, the United Nations warns …

With the great global surge of mobile gadget use has come a tsunami of cell phone garbage, the United Nations warned on Monday—especially in India and China. And that's on top of tidal waves of computer, video receiver, and kitchen electronics junk skewing about the planet in all the wrong places. All in all, global e-waste is growing by 40 million tons a year, a study by the UN's Environmental Programme concludes.

The UNEP will soon meet in Bali, Indonesia to further consider the problem, and it is huge. Consumers bought almost 900 million mobile phones in 2006 and over a billion in 2007, UNEP estimates. A big percentage of those devices are just thrown in the trash, or given to local collectors who extract precious metals from them in environmentally hazardous ways. The study predicts that by 2020, the amount of e-waste from dumped mobiles in China will be about seven times larger than it was in 2007, and in India 18 times higher. At present, India alone produces about 1,700 tons of e-waste from mobiles, Columbia about 1,200 tons, and Kenya another 150 tons.

The United States is the big winner when it comes to e-waste: 3 million tons a year all told, followed by China's 2.3 million. But, "despite having banned e-waste imports, China remains a major e-waste dumping ground for developed countries," the report notes.

All that junk doesn't just come from mobiles. By 2020, e-waste in South Africa and China from old computers will have leapt to as much as 400 percent of its 2007 levels, and by 500 percent in India. In China and India, the piles of dumped TV sets will be 1.5 to two times taller, while the mountains of old refrigerators could reach three times their present altitude, the report warns.

And don't get the UN started about old printers, pagers, digital cameras, music players, and laptops. "This report gives new urgency to establishing ambitious, formal and regulated processes for collecting and managing e-waste via the setting up of large, efficient facilities in China," declared UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner. Everywhere else too, he added. Much of the developing world faces "rising environmental damage and health problems if e-waste recycling is left to the vagaries of the informal sector."

In and out

There are two big problems with the production and discarding of all this electronic stuff, the survey says. A huge quantity of precious metals must be dug out of the earth to manufacture these things. Mobile phone and PC making gobbles up three percent of all the world's gold and silver available each year, not to mention 13 percent of all palladium, 15 percent of cobalt, and plenty of copper, steel, nickel, and aluminum as well. These spew tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

In developing countries, much of this e-waste is mined yet again by "backyard recyclers" who take apart the discarded devices for their tiny quantities of gold and other precious metals, a practice that releases "steady plumes of far-reaching toxic pollution," but recovers very little value compared to more efficient and modern industrial recycling plants.

Solutions

The challenge for the world is to collect all this e-waste and get it to more modern recycling facilities, the UN says. The report is particularly critical of China for its slowness in dealing with the problem. "The consumers in China have low awareness about the pollution from the informal e-waste recycling," it concludes. "They tend to sell their end-of-life (EOL) equipment to the informal collectors for positive earnings. This habit will cost the future formal collection system and how much waste equipment formal collectors could receive from the consumers."

The "future formal collection system" that the UN recommends doesn't necessarily mean completely replacing current collection networks or importing high tech equipment from elsewhere. The survey notes that these networks are efficient in the sense that daily collectors have strong ties to their communities. "Moreover, deep-level manual dismantling in formal or informal environments is preferred over semiautomatic processes due to the abundant workforce and low labour costs."

But many of the informal methods of extraction being used, such as wet-chemical leaching, pose serious environmental hazards. So the next step is to set up "e-waste management centers of excellence" around the developing world, by building on existing organizations and systems. "One person's waste can be another's raw material," optimistically noted UN Under-Secretary General Konrad Osterwalder. "The challenge of dealing with e-waste represents an important step in the transition to a green economy."

Matthew Lasar
Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Emailmatthew.lasar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@matthewlasar